For me it's
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Final Fantasy Tactics
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Final Fantasy VII
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Final Fantasy XI
The three games I keep coming back to in the franchise.
Tactics has the best writing imo as well as gameplay.
Visually speaking VII's aesthetic and music are peak FF.
And then when it comes to getting lost in the lore and world of a virtual game, I like XI.
Granted all 3 share similar themes like good writing, music, gameplay, etc. but those are my standouts.
How about you?
9, 7,
Lost Odyssey, 6.8 has wonderful music and graphics but the story and characters are pretty much doodoo.
I played the entire XIII trilogy despite thinking XIII was a colossal failure on all fronts. I thought it was so uniquely, fascinatingly bad that I just had to see how they'd try to build on it going forward, and to Square Enix's credit, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns were infinitely better games, not that it necessarily amounted to much. I said 8's characters and story were doodoo but XIII was just abominable Squenix nonsense all the way